English 104 - Cora Agatucci
Introduction to Literature: Fiction

Smooth Talk (1985)
~ Grand Jury Prize, Sundance Film Festival, 1986 ~
Film adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates's short story
"Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" (1966)
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Smooth Talk (USA, 1985, 92 min. Rated R: Goldcrest Films, Nepenthe Productions, American Playhouse, Palmyra Films, SpectraFilm). Source: Internet Movie Database Title Search: Smooth Talk (1985)

Director. Joyce Chopra.
Producers: Lindsay Law, Timothy Marx, and Martin Rosen.
Screenplay: Tom Cole, based on the short story "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been" by Joyce Carol Oates.
Cinematographer: James Glennon.
Editor: Patrick Dodd.
Music: James Taylor.
Starring Treat Williams, Laura Dern, Mary Kay Place, Levon Helm, Sarah Inglis.

"There is a certain kind of teenager who always seems to be waiting for something. Some live in the moment, but these others - these waiting ones - seem to be the victims of time. It stretches before them in long, empty hours. You can look at them and almost literally see the need in their eyes. It is a need to be someone else, somewhere else. Connie, the heroine in Smooth Talk, is a girl like that." --Roger Ebert. Excerpt from Rev. of Smooth Talk, Chicago Sun Times 9 May 1986.
URL: http://www.suntimes.com/ebert/ebert_reviews/1986/05/57590.html [last accessed: 3 November 2001].

Brief Plot Summary for Smooth Talk: "Based on the short story, 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been,' by Joyce Carol Oates, this film chronicles a 15-year-old girl, Connie's, sexual awakening in the Northern California suburbs. Her experimentations begin to get out of hand when the mysterious Arnold Friend takes an interest in her." --Eric Zuckerman, Internet Movie Database, URL: http://us.imdb.com/Plot?0090037 [last accessed: 3 November 2001].

"Smooth Talk reminds you that even movies about and for teen-agers don't have to deal in such trade-offs [i.e. the commercialism of gross-out jokes and unambiguous happy-ever-after endings] in order to connect. Still, it's almost shocking to find a film that deals so purely with the real fears and desires of young people who are too knowing to be children, too inexperienced to be adults. The movie has a haunting power that comes directly from its vision of adolescence as a trembling, uncertain yet also exalted state of mind." --John Hartl. Excerpt from "Uncompromisingly Sensitive" [Rev. of Smooth Talk], Film.com: No date.
URL: http://film.com/film-review/1986/10153/109/default-review.html [last accessed: 3 November 2001].

"To give away the last 30 minutes of Smooth Talk would be criminal, because one of the best things about the film is the element of surprise at what comes at the conclusion. What happens is one of the most unpredictable, shocking things I have ever seen, but it leads up to a moment in the last scene that leaves closure for what had happened, and is one of my all-time favorite scenes in any film. . . . I wouldn't change a thing about Smooth Talk. It is one of the few motion pictures I've seen that enraptured me in its story and characters so well that at the end, I was left with a lot of deep emotions and feelings about what I had witnessed, and also about the brilliance and subtlety of the last touching scene." --Dustin Putman. Excerpt from [Rev. of] "Smooth Talk (1985)." USERNET: rec.arts.movies.reviews, 1999; available from Rotten Tomatoes
URL: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/movie-1019251/ [last accessed: 3 November 2001].

Joyce Carol Oates on Smooth Talk:

"In adapting a narrative so spare and thematically foreshortened as 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?' film director Joyce Chopra and screenwriter Tom Cole were required to do a good deal of filling in, expanding, inventing. Connie's story becomes lavishly, and lovingly, textured; she is not an allegorical figure so much as a "typical" teenaged girl (if Laura Dern, spectacularly good-looking, can be so defined). Joyce Chopra, who has done documentary films on contemporary teenage culture and, yet more authoritatively, has an adolescent daughter of her own, creates in Smooth Talk a vivid and absolutely believable world for Connie to inhabit. Or worlds: as in the original story there is Connie-at-home, and there is Connie-with-her-friends."
. . . .
"Smooth Talk is, in a way, as much Connie's mother's story as it is Connie's; its center of gravity, its emotional nexus, is frequently with the mother—warmly and convincingly played by Mary Kay Place. (Though the mother's sexual jealousy of her daughter is slighted in the film.)"
. . . .
"My difficulties with Smooth Talk have primarily to do with my chronic hesitation—about seeing/hearing work of mine abstracted from its contexture of language. All writers know that Language is their subject; quirky word choices, patterns of rhythm, enigmatic pauses, punctuation marks. Where the quick scanner sees "quick" writing, the writer conceals nine tenths of the iceberg. . . . The writer works in a single dimension, the director works in three. I assume they are professionals to their fingertips; authorities in their medium as I am an authority (if I am) in mine. I would fiercely defend the placement of a semicolon in one of my novels but I would probably have deferred in the end to Joyce Chopra's decision to reverse the story's conclusion, turn it upside down, in a sense, so that the film ends not with death, not with a sleepwalker's crossing over to her fate, but upon a scene of reconciliation, rejuvenation."

". . . 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?' defines itself as allegorical in its conclusion: Death and Death's chariot (a funky souped-up convertible) have come for the Maiden. Awakening is, in the story's final lines, moving out into the sunlight where Arnold Friend waits:

'My sweet little blue-eyed girl," he said in a half-sung sigh that had nothing to do with [Connie's] brown eyes but was taken up just the same by the vast sunlit reaches of the land behind him and on all sides of him—so much land that Connie had never seen before and did not recognize except to know that she was going to it.'

"—a conclusion impossible to transfigure into film."

--Joyce Carol Oates. Excerpt from "'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?' and Smooth Talk: Short Story Into Film." [Originally published in the New York Times, March 23, 1986. Rpt. in Eng 104 Textbook: Charters as "Smooth Talk: Short Story into Film," pp. 913-916.] Rpt. Celestial Timepiece: A Joyce Carol Oates Home Page
URL: http://storm.usfca.edu/~southerr/smoothtalk.html [last accessed: 3 November 2001].

Film Basics: Learning to "Read" and Write About Film (Cora Agatucci, Eng 104)
http://www.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/eng104/film.htm

Internet Movie Database - IMDb
search for info on film adaptations of the fiction we read
(for a list of some of those adaptations, see our Eng 104 course text by Ann Charters:
Appendix 6, "Short Stories on Film and Video," pp. 992-994):
http://www.imdb.com/
...and more webresources are listed on WR316 Movielinks:
(Cora Agatucci, Central Oregon CC)
http://www.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/wr316/movielinks.htm

See also Film Adaptation of Literature
URL: http://www.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/eng104/filmadaptation.htm

YOU ARE HERE ~ Smooth Talk (1985)
URL of this webpage:
http://www.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/eng104/smoothtalk.htm
Last Updated: 26 September 2003

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English 104 - Cora Agatucci Introduction to Literature: Fiction

English 104 - Cora Agatucci
Introduction to Literature: Fiction